A fundamental need of commerce-based societies is the transportation of goods from one location to another. The development of various postal systems, first on the national and then on an international basis, established an organized system wherein a carrier for a price would convey a parcel from a sender to a recipient. The service provided by such carriers resulted in increasing demand and expansion of their served customer base. In addition to the governmentally sponsored postal services, private carriers have been organized to transport a wide variety of parcels for paying customers. Such companies include those known as United Parcel Service, Federal Express, DHL, Airborne and Emory, to name a few. The proliferation of such companies demonstrates the increasing need for their services.
In addition to the ordinary demands on the parcel carrier industry, the expansion of Internet commerce already has placed, and is expected to continue to place, increasing demands on the need to ship small parcels from a merchant to a customer. The role of the parcel carrier is becoming increasingly integral to the success or failure of consumer's on-line experience and business in general. Shippers know the importance of having a dependable carrier who ultimately provides dependable service to the end-use customer.
Conventional techniques for shipping parcels between senders and recipients can be inconvenient and result in packing waste. For example, when a parcel is shipped in a container, such as a flexible pouch, a cardboard box or the like, the sender typically creates a label for the container, which includes the recipient's address as well as a return address for the sender. It is quite common, for example, for an individual sender to create a shipping package by packaging the parcel into a container and affixing to the container a sticky label having the appropriate origin and destination address either printed or handwritten thereon. The shipping package may then be taken to a governmentally sponsored postal service where it is weighed and applied with appropriate postage before being shipped to the destination location corresponding to the recipient's address. In similar fashion, a sender may take the parcel to a private carrier where it is packaged and labeled, with the private carrier taking responsibility for shipment.
Another manner of shipping parcels between senders and recipients which is widely used is through the use of containers and labeling constructions which are provided by carriers, such as Federal Express, to their customer base. Here, the sender prepares the shipping package by placing the parcel in a container provided by the private carrier, and creates an appropriate shipping label on a form provided by the private carrier. In the Federal Express system, for example, the shipping label itself is a multi-sheet construction including an original form and a plurality of duplicate forms releasably attached thereto via perforation. Here, the multi-sheet shipping label is filled out to include the appropriate shipping information, as well as desired handling instructions for the carrier. Oftentimes, these forms additionally have areas for including the sender's account number so that charges are billed to an appropriate account, as well as appropriate tracking information utilized by the private carrier. The sender maintains a “sender's copy” of the label before it is either picked up by the carrier or deposited at an appropriate drop-off location, such as a drop-box maintained by the private carrier. In any event, when the shipping package is ultimately ready for shipment, the sender maintains a copy of the shipping label and a duplicate version of the shipping label is sealed within a shipping sleeve that is adhered to the container, whether it be a box, a pouch or the like. There are a variety of other techniques for creating shipping packages which are utilized by individuals, as well as private and governmentally sponsored carriers, so that the above is only a snapshot of the various techniques employed in today's commerce.
A drawback of these illustrative techniques, as well as others employed today, is that the labeling constructions themselves and the containers for the parcels are generally not reusable. As a result, there is much packing waste which is attendant with conventional shipping techniques, which inherently contributes to landfill waste and results in added costs and inconveniences to carriers and customers alike. Accordingly, there remains an increasing need to develop improved techniques to facilitate the preparation of shipping packages through the use of reusable containers and reusable labeling constructions, while at the same time alleviating or reducing these drawbacks.